It's also cascading down to the used phone market. I haven't bought a brand new top-line phone in 18 years because I'm not a heavy user. I buy used/refurbed models from 3-4 years ago and use them for 3-5 years. Typically I could get them for $150-$275 by timing a purchase with new-model release cycles, when early-adopters flood the market with castoffs, so the level 2 adopters upgrade to a used level 1, etc. This past Christmas season I considered upgrading, but there was noticeable across-the-board inflation. In 2026, purchasing some 2022/3 models in good condition were the same dollar amount as purchasing a 2021 model in 2022. And that doesn't even include the continuing US government devaluation of the dollar itself via uncontrolled debt spending.

Thanks for the clarification. That was helpful. I now see that the contradiction I perceived was a parsing/wording issue, not an actual conflict over the underlying ideas represented by the wording.

Your first sentence is correct, on average.
I bolded the parts which I do not think are proven. I believe that the real explanation for those portions is a combination of sample bias and reversed correlation-causation error.

I think the only claims we could confidently make about this issue are:
-The mathematical mindset makes it easier to program (ie write procedural instructions which rely heavily on basic algebraic expressions, ie math).
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to enter math/science schools in college.
-People who have a mathematical mindset are more likely to understand and succeed at math/science curriculum.
-People without a mathematical mindset are unlikely to pursue math/science beyond the bare minimum (college algebra), so not only will they lack the mathematical mindset, they also will never have reason to seriously engage with extended formal logic like proofs.
-People with a mathematical mindset will, through their own choices, be exposed to curriculum and situations where their existing mathematical mindset can be honed.

That is-- those with a higher capacity for mathematical reasoning will self-select into and persist to graduation/completion of situations where their capacity has been harnessed into functional skill.

However, the above statement does not at all mean that the mathematical mindset itself is being created/implanted by math/CS departments.

The person makes the degree. The degree doesn't make the person,
But we have to pretend it does, for ideological reasons.

Over the past 50 years we've seen the establishment of a socially-motivated (as opposed to factual/scientifically-informed) belief that "you can be anything you put your mind to" and theoretically every kid could get that CS degree if we give them enough support/funding/nutrition/affirmation/social services/parenting/intervention/accommodation. It's a really clumsy and poorly thought out but well-meaning, egalitarianism.

Unfortunately, being well-meant doesn't make something true. Human beings are NOT simplistic algorithms and do not behave in deterministic ways. Math reasoning is not the same as reading a history book and reasoning through a dialectic narrative. Exclusion runs counter to the modern social belief system, so people get nervous and start backing away if you were to make a statement like: "Mathematical reasoning is a trait possessed by a small subset of the population. We do not understand its origin. Some people have it and some don't. For those that have it, developing their skill through practice can give them access to specific career/salary advantages that are simply inaccessible to 90% of people, the same way no 5'9" man is going to be a starting Center or Forward on a successful NBA team. even if you had a blank check to give him world-class professional sport-specific coaching and general athletic training from age 8 onward. Indeed, it would be gross mismanagement of resources to pour that into him and expect him to succeed." Of course, the reason that statement makes keyboard warriors reach for their "Problematic Post Alert" button is because, unfortunately, it is chiefly brought up by people whose underlying beliefs are in fact problematic.

Not that it can't be believed, but that it should not be taken as definitive reality rather than temporary aberration.

Covid showed the huge fragility of most systems, but perhaps most frail was the process of learning.
We are now at the peak of a time interval during which nearly all college students are people who had their education and experiential development terribly disrupted right when they would be learning must-have foundations in logic, mathematics, and rhetoric. I would bet that even if we made no other changes from what we are doing today, 2022-2028 will turn out to have local minima in a wide variety of education performance metrics.

I have wondered how long until we see people wearing stickers/shirts that say, "NOTICE: You are currently under audio/video surveillance" the same way most retail stores have those posted at the entrances and throughout the store.

That claim does not seem supportable, as written.

1) It is not true that all businesses are private property. That is, the property may be privately owned, but retail businesses and the parking lots which are operating on private property are considered public spaces for all sorts of legal situations. Simply post a "no women allowed" sign in front of your store to find out just how legally private your business property is.

2) What do you mean by "right" in this context? If you pull out your device and start recording someone walking down the aisle at the grocery store, that person can not legally prevent you from doing so. That is, that person does not have a "right" to be free from being recorded there. They may choose to get the store owner involved. And the owner can tell you that they do not allow the use of recording devices on their property (other than their own recording devices), and that you need to stop recording or leave. If you refuse either option, when the police show up, any citation/arrest they enact will be for trespassing. It will not be for using your camera. In other words, you do in fact have a personal right to record your surroundings, including at a private business. However, you don't have a right to physically be on someone else's property if they've told you they do not want you to record while you are there.

The same way you have a right to believe in Allah and talk to people about Allah, but if you're walking around a grocery store preaching to people, the property owner can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave, the owner can call the police and have you physically removed/barred from the property -- and during the entirety of your removal, citation or arrest, you continue to possess your full legal right to believe in a religion and practice religious speech.

"must" is doing an awful lot of work there.
The fact that some of us at some point may have chosen to, is not the same thing as "must". If we are still free democratic people we can change our minds and choose differently.

However, the higher the level at which we make a choice, the harder it will be to make a different choice in the future, and the more likely the discussion is to become a contentious impasse as 350 million people will never agree on everything and at that scale every edge case has to be considered which leads to 800-page bill proposals that are inherently inescapably anti-democratic because nether we the people nor they the legislators can Srsly read, understand, be aware of, negotiate, and navigate such a system.

Federalizing everything is an effective way to ensure your preferred choices apply to everyone. It is also one of the most effective ways to strangle a democracy. The speed of the asphyxiation is the only variable, not the inexorable fact of its death. An individual human being with total control over their home can barely organize the knicknacks and miscellaneous boxes in their garage or on their dining table, and cannot remember what all is in the attic. Humans together completely lack the capacity to tend run a single government of 300 million people that is all three things: efficient, effective, and free. At that level all you end up with is the current tyranny of the bell curve, where only two kinds of things happen: 1) the fickle center-bell majority uses its numerical superiority to pass legislation/regulation enforcing its desires on various minorities. 2) the focused outer-bell individuals use their monetary superiority to pass legislation/regulation preserving their assets and power.

Large scale systems like the US Federal Government are inherently, inescapably anti-democratic, anti-minority, anti-individual, pro-plutocrat, pro-corporate.
That power gradient is built into the operational metastructure, regardless of what lofty words are inscribed in its laws and electoral rhetoric.

FIFY.

Whispering no longer works. Voice isolation tech has gotten extremely good at fully discerning speech even when barely voiced at all.
Try it. Set your phone down on the table. Open your phone's message app. Turn on voice dictation. Back up 1-3 feet. Speak as quietly as you can while still enunciating all vowels/consonants.

Mine correctly transcribes speech this way, even in a room with background hums from several different machines.

Personally, I would not say anything confidential within the same room as any new phone/tablet/TV.

That's literally what an employee does.
It's what it means to BE an employee.
It's the only reason to HIRE/PAY employees.

Make no mistake about the end goal here. Regardless of what shiny baubles and tasty firewater the colonisers offer you today. They will break every treaty tomorrow and wipe you from the planet.

Very interesting.

If someone asked me to make a list of animals with wings, or animals that prey on other animals, or any other quality, I would never think to include any insects on the list. To me, there is a difference between Animalia the scientific category, and animals the living things we talk about.

If someone said "I just moved out of the city to retire in a country house, so now pretty much every day I see animals outside" it would never occur to me that they might be referring to insects. Quite the contrary - if insects are considered animals for everyday speech, that sentence could never be uttered in any rational sense, because if insects are animals then there are animals everywhere. A Manhattan high-rise is filled with animals like roaches, spiders, mosquitos, bed bugs, crickets...
In fact, in my experience there are far more roaches in the big city than in the country, because in the country insects have more natural predators, fewer places to hide, and you don't have massive piles of edible waste that are inevitably created by cities.

I'm going to use that if I'm ever prosecuted for identity theft.
"Your Honor, I didn't steal anything. I only scheduled a remote degradation of their financial accounts."

Yes, scientifically speaking, mosquitos are classified within Kingdom animalia. But in everyday speech, do most people think of insects as animals? If you asked a thousand random people to list three animals they'd hate to be trapped in a room with, I expect you'd get things like crocodile, tiger, grizzly. I would not expect people to reply with wasps and roaches.

Is this something that is regional/cultural?

I had one that I used at home and traveled with for two years before I accidentally discovered that it literally cannot be turned off. Even if you press the power button on the speaker and the little power light goes out. As long as it has battery charge, it's in BT listening mode and can be activated by the manufacturer's app running on a device in range. The default device name was BOOM.